


Good Medicine, Bad Patient

by skarletfyre



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Caretaking, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Roleplay?, Sickfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-27 02:00:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7599046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skarletfyre/pseuds/skarletfyre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spy gets a headcold and is absolutely pathetic about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Good Medicine, Bad Patient

“ _Dogteur.”_

The voice had come from across the room. It was faint, muffled slightly, and Medic paid absolutely no attention to it at all.

“ _Dogteur.”_

It was fairly easy to ignore the voice calling out to him. Partially because of how quiet it was, coming from inside the adjoining room, and partly because the doctor was well and truly focused on the work on the table in front of it. A graduated cylinder full of spinal fluid was in his right hand and a twelve gauge syringe was in his left, and bringing the two together required a delicate touch as his supply of such fluid was both limited and very difficult to collect. He didn't want to risk contamination or any spillage. The task required his utmost concentration.

“ _Medig!”_ the voice called for the third time, a pained and plaintive wail that carried loudly enough that he couldn't claim to have not heard it.

Medic closed his eyes for a brief moment, and then gave up.

“ _Was ist los?”_ he shouted back over his shoulder. He squinted at the fine black marks on the side of the syringe, trying to decide exactly how much he wanted to withdraw in the first place.

“Help me.”

_Pathetic._

With a great, long-suffering sigh the doctor carefully set down the cylinder and recapped the needle in his hand. He stripped off the thin latex gloves he wore for proper lab work, in place of the thick, slick, elbow length red rubber gloves he wore into battle. They were good for protecting his hands and wrists and providing extra grip on his heavy equipment. And they were not so good for delicate tasks that required precision. Medic preferred to work bare handed, truthfully, but after a number of “anonymous” complaints he'd been forced to go out and buy a box of cheap latex gloves and a bottle of hand sanitizer that was the size of a small wine cask.

He made a great show of approaching it now, noisily pumping the smelly gel into his palm and rubbing into his knuckles and the webs between his fingers. His patient was very particular about germs. Medic had learned this the hard way.

“May I come in?” the doctor asked, standing outside the half open door to his own bedroom.

“ _Oui.”_

“I'm opening the door now,” he warning, taking hold of the handle. It was best, he had also learned, to be very cautious when approaching his patient in their current state. They did not like to be startled, and they startled easily.

With a measured slowness, Medic pushed the door inward and peered around the edge of it, waiting a moment to see if anything would come hurling toward him.

It took another moment for his eyes to adjust to the low lighting in the little room he called home. The only window, narrow and set high in the wall of the basement, was tacked over with a thick towel to block out the majority of any sun or moonlight that might try to stream in. The lamp by his bedside was off, and the bulb had been removed. The only lights in the room at all were the glowing red digital numbers of his clock radio and the single, hovering cherry of the end of a lit cigarette.

“Put that out!” Medic snapped, throwing the door open wide behind him and letting in as much light as possible. _“Um Gottes willen,_ I've told you not to smoke in here!”

The cigarette bobbed and flared, and was quickly snatched between Medic's fingers and crushed beneath his heel. The room smelled terrible.

“Abologies,” said the lump of blankets at the head of his bed.

“If you are sorry then you will stop doing it.”

The blankets had no response. The wilted slightly as the man beneath them let out a nasally sigh.

Medic crossed his arms over his chest and tried not to frown too sternly.

“What is the problem, Spy? Why did you call me?”

He had already had _some_ idea of what the problem might be. Something small and asinine and insignificant, a mild inconvenience at best, just like all the other problems that he'd been called in to attend to over the last four days, ever since Spy began displaying symptoms of a fever. The Frenchman was already sleeping in his bed, as per their private arrangement, so it was a small matter to convince him to stay there while he recovered. It was one of the worst arguments that Medic had ever won. He regretted it daily.

“I am cold.”

Spy's voice was muffled by the heavy down-stuffed duvet he'd wrapped entirely around himself. And the afghan on top of it. And the sheets beneath it. These were precautions, the doctor had been told, against prying eyes. With a stuffed up nose and a temperature of 101°F, Spy was unwilling to keep his mask on and suffer through trying to move it in time every time he sneezed. But, he didn't want to risk “exposing” himself to anyone. Not even Medic, who had seen and touched and likely tasted every other part of him at some point or another. But not his hair, or his neck, or his ears, or the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks. Those places were still off limits. For now.

“You are joking.”

“Blease,” Spy said, more of a pleading whine than a rebuke. _“Dogteur,_ I am so cold.”

“It is the middle of August, _dummkopff._ If you are cold in this room, under all of those blankets, then there is something far more wrong with your health than a simple cold. Do I need to run more tests?”

Spy and his blankets recoiled visibly at the mention of tests. He'd been put through a cursory examination at his admission, to solidify the transfer from “bed mate” to “patient” with at least some legitimacy. And perhaps Medic had taken a few liberties while he'd had the man on the table, a little swab here, a little sample collection there, a few minor injections of minorly unstable serums and compounds to test his immune system's response to such things while already under stress. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“Don't you touch me!” Spy hissed, and immediately sneezed. He sneezed three more times in quick succession, then fell silent.

Medic waited.

“How are you cold?” he finally asked, when it seemed that the lump of blankets was not going to speak again without prompting.

“ _Mon pied.”_

“Your foot?”

“ _Oui.”_

“Your foot is cold.”

“ _Oui, cheri.”_

“Only your foot?”

“It is so cold.”

“Spy,” Medic said, as diplomatically as he possibly could, “I am going to murder you.”

Spy sneezed again and let out a weak, piteous cry.

For such a hard man who had lived through so much horror, who had been witness and accomplice to atrocities a dozen times over, it had come as a complete surprise to Medic – and to the rest of the team – that the strongest and most self-sufficient person he had ever known completely fell to pieces when faced with mild illness. Not even nausea or coughing up blood, all it took was the sniffles to drive him completely out of commission.

Or perhaps this was all a farce, designed for Medic's benefit. To have him waiting on Spy hand and foot, day in and day out, just for the chance of collecting a useful sample or two or get a glimpse at his enigmatic lover's face.

If so, it was working.

“The blankets moved when I sat up,” the lump that was Spy told him sorrowfully. “My foot slipped out from beneath them. It's been uncovered for hours, I am afraid my toes have frozen. Feel them, _Dogteur._ Feel how cold my poor toes have become.”

Medic was not going to feel Spy's toes.

“I am not going to feel your toes,” he told him, squinting at the dark bed for any sign of an unclothed foot. And there it was, a pale and gnarled appendage with long, articulate toes and a few wisps of dark hair sprouting from the top of it. Medic was repulsed.

“What do you expect me to do about this?” he asked. “All you have to do is move your foot back under the blankets and it will warm itself up. I don't understand why you haven't already done this.”

“I'm too _tired,”_ Spy moaned, and for one shining moment Medic thought he really might kill him after all. “Blease, _cheri, mon chou._ Blease, help me.”

There was a long moment of a clear, brilliant, electromagnetic tension that hung in the warm air between the two of them as Medic stood and processed the words that he had just endured listening to. It could have been a minute or many minutes or only a few seconds. Honestly he couldn't tell. He couldn't keep track of anything else, besides the sticky, heavy texture of the sweat on his temples and the feel of the thick vein in his neck pulsing with every furious beat of his heart.

“Are you asking me to pull the blankets over your foot for you?” Medic said, his voice barely than a whisper, staring the part of the blanket lump where he imagined Spy's head would be. “Did you really call me in here just for that?”

“You are the doctor here, barely,” the Frenchman said, and Medic felt his own eyelid twitch. “I trust you to be the one to administer my treatments.”

“If I saw off your foot it will stop being cold,” he threatened. “I would keep it nice and warm, in a jar on the shelf above the radiator. How would that be for a treatment, hm?”

“ _Dogteur...”_ Spy whined, dragging the mangled, stuffy word out in a childish manner. “It is only a little bit of blanket, _s'il vous plaît,_ have mercy. I am terribly ill.”

“You have a head cold!”

“ _Oui,_ and it has left me so drained, so weak. I am a poor excuse for a spy, _non,_ to be bedridden this way. I don't know when I'll recover.”

Medic wanted to tell Spy that he was laying it on a bit thick. The part of the helpless patient could be endearing, under certain circumstances, but Medic was having a hard time finding anything cute about this little performance while he had a full jar of bodily fluids sitting in the other room just waiting to be worked with.

But he had to play along. He must, and he knew he must. If Spy wanted to be his frail and sickly little ward in need of attention, then Medic was going to be the strict and overbearing warden with all of the answers and no room for arguments. He _was_ the doctor here.

With a swift, deliberate jerk, Medic reached bent and yanked the covers down a few inches to cover Spy's exposed foot. He was rewarded at once was a sigh of relief.

“Ah, _merci, cheri._ You are so good to me.”

Medic, still leaning over the bed, braced himself with one hand on the thin outline of Spy's ankle. He moved closer to the upper portion of the lump, the head, he assumed, and pressed his lips firmly against the soft layer of fabric. Beneath it he could feel the hard shape of a skull, perhaps even a face. He stayed there for a moment, letting the action register as a kiss, before drawing slowly away.

“I am going to be up for a while longer,” he told the man in his bed. He paused, and then, “The next time I catch you with a cigarette in this room I will put it out on your tongue, do you understand?”

The blankets shivered beautifully.

“Oh, _Dogteur,”_ Spy hummed, as much as he was able through the clogged mess of his sinuses. “Don't make such sweet promises if you don't intend to keep them.”

Medic smiled and gave Spy's ankle a brief squeeze beneath the blankets, then straightened himself up.

“Get some rest, _schatz._ I will be back to make sure you're still warm enough in an hour or so.”

Spy hummed again, but did not speak. Medic pulled the door to behind him as he left, leaving it open only a crack so that he could hear if he was called.

Now, finally. Back to work.


End file.
